Fall progressed into Winter and my life became an almost-normal cycle of school, home and Acro training. Anxieties of school and having friends were smoothed over and bad memories mostly faded away into the distance as I didn't have much time to think
/about them at all, such was my now-packed schedule. That nearly a year ago I was lying in a hospital bed, coming out of a months-long coma seemed like a dream, a dream I'd nearly forgotten.
The only current reminder of the past was the two days a week when my brother would leave Chamberlin after classes to be shuttled back to Cambridge where Unit 04 was parked. He didn't talk much about what they did there, except to say that it was boring
/and required little more than for him to be present inside the EVA while the unit was tested and studied. It seemed pointless to me, the Angels were gone, SEELE was defeated, so why keep the EVA around still? I was about to find out.
At the end of Fall Quarter there was Winter, and then Winter Formal. Winter Formal was the major social event of the school season and I didn't want to miss it. Unfortunately that tether of the legal system again snapped me back, as what they defined
/as "education" didn't include after-school dances. I had already missed Homecoming two months earlier for the same reason and not wanting to be left out of this one, wrote to the judge to ask if they could make an exception for me this once. Judge
/Jackson wrote me back, asking if I had been keeping myself busy and out of trouble, and I responded by telling her everything I was doing, adding that I hadn't stolen any Evangelions during the rest of this year and wasn't planning to. I guess that
/was convincing, because with a couple of days to go to the big night I got my court clearance, provided that Cinderella-style I was back home by midnight.
We worked fast to get me ready, Maria bought me a wonderful sequined emerald-green strapless dress and polished black-high heeled sandals to go with it, plus a nice wrap and faux fur coat given that nights in Southern Maine had now dropped below freezing.
/My hair was done up right after our last acro session of the season, as Keiko was going back to Japan to visit family. Given that I had it cut super-short back in March, I hadn't needed to mess with my hair much and even now I had only gotten it down
/to my collar. But at least it had good body and the hairdresser did a great job of fluffing that out, accented with a nice decorative band that matched my outfit.
So I spent that Saturday getting everything ready for me to go out. Patrick decided not to try and match with my outfit, opting for what he called a "cowboy suit" of tan jacket and slacks, boots, and bolo tie. He did finally cut his hair however, and
/he looked downright dapper once he gelled it up. Dressed before me, Patrick watched just outside the doorway as I did the final touches in my bathroom mirror.
"What do you think?" I asked him just after I put on full makeup and gave him a look at me.
"Pretty good," he complemented. "You know," he observed, "I think this is the first time I've ever seen you actually wear pantyhose."
It was true. Generally I hated wearing any kind of hose, a result of experimenting back in my Princess of Second Branch days and finding stockings were itchy and sweaty in the dry heat of the Nevada climate. Besides, I had a pretty good pair of legs and
/didn't want to hide them. But once the weather here in Maine dropped below forty degrees bare legs paired with a school skirt was not going to work and after suffering in the cold Arjuna gifted me a pair of black cotton tights. I liked them enough
/that within a week I had another three pairs, and decided that Formal was a chance to try something new. So with the dress I wore a pair of black hose, simple but elegant, although they still took some getting used to wearing.
"Yup," I replied. "I guess I'm a bit grown up now."
"You really are a princess," Patrick told me. I walked up to him, wanting to at least share a moment before we headed out.
"Really, do I look okay?"
"You do," he said simply. I rewarded him with a quick kiss on the lips. "Thank you."
"Thank you, at least for getting me out of trouble." What he meant was that we had agreed to be each other's "escort" to the dance, not using the word date for obvious reasons, and this was largely to save Patrick from Linda, who in the last couple of
/months had taken an increasingly aggressive approach to Patrick after finding out his girlfriend was eight thousand miles away. There was something else, as since we started school Patrick had always encouraged me to at least consider dating but I
/still wasn't quite ready. One reason was that I didn't see the point to it if I couldn't even leave the house, but besides that there was something I was still working out for myself even now.
As Patrick got his jacket and winter coat I walked down the hallway and found the other bedroom, the one where we always kept the door closed. I had avoided going into Vance's bedroom all year, having only come in here the day we moved in, but now I just
/needed to see it again.
I turned on the room light and looked around. The small bedroom was highly decorated, with all of the tastes of the occupant becoming quite apparent as Vance loved hunting in the woods, loved boating on the water, and loved looking at hot girls. There
/were plenty of posters all around the bedroom walls representing all three inclinations. To an outsider, Vance would have seemed just like any hot-blooded American country-raised teenaged male.
Sitting on the bed, I looked around the room and tried to remember everything about him, when I first saw him at Second Branch, and all of the fun times we had both here and back at NERV-2. I could remember his tall stature and dark eyes. I could still
/remember his strong arms around me and how warm and fuzzy that felt. Nothing had ever felt like that to me before, and nothing had quite since.
Inside of him I knew Vance was conflicted, and that all of this stuff on the outside about him being tough and rugged was a show. He wanted to be loved too, he wanted me there, but also he knew he wasn't ordinary. A boy who was a natural born killer,
/who maybe was afraid that no one ever could love him.
Well I did. And now he was gone. I couldn't let myself think about why anymore, it would just open up doors that I wanted to keep closed and behind me. But I couldn't still help wanting him here. He should have been my date tonight, he should be the one
/that I'll dance with, and then sneak a kiss out in the back of the gymnasium with while no one's watching. It should have been him.
I looked around the room and noticed something I hadn't yet seen before: at the very edge of his dresser just next to the bed was a small ceramic tiger, maybe two inches high. "Tiger" was always his nickname for me, and I couldn't help but think it was
/me he thought of when he went to sleep in that bed at night. Without thinking I took it and held the tiny tiger in my hands, caressing it as my thoughts shifted between past and future. Hearing Patrick's footsteps outside the hallway, I knew it was
/time to go, so I clutched the tiger in my hand and then got up off the bed, turning out the light and then shutting the door behind me as I walked out. I never came back to the room again.
The dance was held in the gymnasium, and as we entered we noticed that the entire interior had been decorated with banners and balloons in the school's colors of red, blue and white. It did look like something you'd expect to see in a teenager movie from
/the 1980s, and even '80s music from old groups like A-Ha and OMD were playing on giant speakers. The whole interior was crammed to the gills with kids, as it seemed nearlyall of our classmates had come that night.
The gymnasium floor had been converted to a dance floor with hundreds of kids twisting and spinning around on it, and there was another stage that had been pulled out of the wall which made for an upper level and a second dance floor. A DJ spun up records
/on that podium and various students made announcements or passed along messages over the loudspeakers. To one side there were drinks and food and a group of students huddled around there that weren't dancing.
Having never been to a dance before I wasn't entirely sure what to do, except to expect to get asked to dance by boys. To me it was my first real steps out into that world so, I thought, here goes and I walked right in.
I made it as far as the drink table, as Arjuna flagged us down. She was wearing a violet floral-patterned long-sleeved dress and black heels and hose, and looked quite pretty. She was overjoyed to see me, reaching up and embracing both of us as we came
/over to her.
"You made it!" she shouted over the music. "I thought they wouldn't let you come!"
"Well we got lucky this time," I replied. I couldn't help but feel hot in the crowded auditorium and took off my coat and wrap, fully revealing my new dress to Arjuna.
"Amazing! You look so beautiful!"
"Thanks! So do you. Did anyone ask you yet?"
"Not yet, actually I was waiting for Linda to get here." She looked around as Patrick took off his own coat and his jacket and hung it on a nearby chair, and then loosened up his collar. I knew he didn't want to be here if and when Linda came up, and
/he looked at me and angled his head towards the dance floor.
"Um, I think we'll go on the floor first…"
Before we could finish the sentence Linda popped right into our little group. Wearing a silver-tinted strapless dress with a short hemline and a giant bow on the front, she looked ready to pounce. "Hi Everyone!" Linda shouted. "Erin, Patrick, so nice
/to see you here tonight! They let you out of jail, huh?"
"You could say that," Patrick responded, clearly nervous.
"Come on, then. Let's go!" Without even waiting to be asked, Linda grabbed Patrick's wrist and dragged him towards the dance floor. He gave me worried looks back but I just shrugged. What could I do now, anyway?
Both Arjuna and I watched as Linda dragged Patrick all the way to the higher level in her attempt to coerce him over. As she watched them, Arjuna told me "she keeps trying. Sometimes it's the one's that look impossible that seem the most attractive."
/I just nodded, as both of us knew of Linda's recent crush on Patrick. Heck, practically the whole school did.
"Although," Arjuna continued, "I couldn't say I blame her." She turned to me. "Your bro is pretty cute. Must be some girl he's got over there far away to get him to be so loyal."
"You know,' I said to her, "If you'd ever met her, you'd know why he's like that. She's truly one of a kind."
"Well," she told me. 'I'll settle for any kind at the moment." Arjuna motioned to the food table.
"All this makes me hungry, do you want to go get anything?"
I declined it, not wanting to spend this night just eating. "Not right now. You go on ahead." She did so, leaving me standing there alone.
What should I do now, I wondered. Should I just stand here until someone asks me? Or maybe go out on the floor and find someone to dance with? The world of adolescent culture still seemed alien to me even after three months at the school. For a brief
/moment I thought back to what I had done before I came here, I had brought a small purse and quickly felt inside for the little tiger. I just needed to touch it, maybe for strength or for luck. Just after I did so I could have sworn I heard a whisper
/in my ear, someone said to me "look behind you." Startled, I swiveled around.
Standing in front of me was Jason. He was surprisingly well-groomed, with his black hair now neatly combed and wearing a dark grey suit with bright red tie. Even his glasses were now gone. But he looked as nervous as I felt.
"Hi," he said. "You made it!"
"Yeah," I replied, blushing. "Your glasses! What happened to them?"
"Oh I wear contacts sometimes," he explained. "It's just really hard getting used to wearing them."
Both of us struggled on what to say next, but it was pretty clear what was on both of our minds.
"Do you want to…"
"Wanna dance?" I blurted out simultaneously.
He nodded and then both of us made for the large dance floor, quickly finding an opening and then moving to the music of 80s group Duran Duran once we found a space. Now this was fun, here I was surrounded by dozens of kids, moving with the music
/and leaving my cares behind. I could do this all night!
We went through a few songs and then the tempo changed to a slower beat as the lights went down lower. Oh, I thought, they do those kind of songs here too. I looked at Jason who seemed like he was having as much fun as I was, and who at least tonight
/didn't seem nearly as geeky as his school reputation put him out to be. But did he want to slow-dance too? We looked at each other for a moment and he didn't run for the outside, so I figured the coast was clear. I stepped up to him, shook my head
/a little, and then slowly put one of my hands behind his back, while my other hand found his.
The music was now "Careless Whisper" by Wham! And we slow-danced those few minutes together without saying much of anything. It felt good to be next to him however. I liked Jason, as a friend. He was pretty smart and true to his reputation probably
/the school's top computer wiz besides myself. He also got along well with Patrick and we'd spend a lot of great lunches all eating together and chatting at school. But I liked this feeling too: this felt kind of cozy for me, and I think it did for
/him as well.
Another slow song came on, this time it was "Lady in Red" by some Irish guy whose name I couldn't remember. We kept the slow dance going, and the music was low enough to allow us to talk above it without shouting.
"Didn't think you make it tonight," he told me. "How did you do it?"
"I was really nice to someone and they let me go," I explained without further detail. We danced a bit more, just swinging to the music and getting just a bit closer to each other. He then spoke again.
"I just wanted to ask you something? Is that okay?"
"Yeah, sure," I told him. We held each other closer, my head now resting on his shoulders.
"You came from Nevada, right?" he asked. I nodded my head, wondering what this was about.
"I think I know where you're really from," he said. "You and your brother."
I tried to play innocent, hoping that he hadn't found our secret out. "What do you mean?"
"Well," Jason explained. "You're from Nevada, and your brother is close by. But he also went to Japan too, and was there long enough to have friends and all."
"Yeah, so?"
"And both of you are sort of really talented and then on top of that you have all of this security. Those guys in the black SUV that pick you up and drop you off."
I was really beginning to worry about this and lifted my head up. "You noticed that?"
"Hard not to, who else comes here to Chamberlin with bodyguards? Oh, there's a couple of rich kids who do but you're not like them at all."
"And…"
"And you're in witness protection and all. So I figured you got to be important somehow," he deduced. Then he threw out the kicker. "You're one of them, aren't you?"
I didn't stop dancing, but I knew that my cover was blown. Strangely I didn't care.
"What do you mean, them?"
"One of The Children. You know, like First, Second, Third, and all that."
I giggled a little, if nervously., "That's a really crazy story."
"Only thing that makes sense, really. I thought your brother was joking that first day but after I kept talking to him I realized it's not a joke, is it?"
My armor dropped a bit now, as it seemed like it was just the two of us on this dance floor, "Okay, so what?"
"Then you were there! You were there when the Angels and stuff, all that happened!" said Jason.
Sighing, I put my head back on his shoulder. "I wasn't really there for most of it," I told him.
"But you were in Nevada, at NERV-2," he said. "Were you there when it went…"
It felt like a tidal wave hit me just then. I had done everything I could do to shut out the memories of where I had come from. I had kept myself busy, mind and body, moved far away and went to a new school, even switched names in the hopes of leaving
/that all behind. But suddenly here I was reminded of the horror of losing my home.
I broke off from Jason, and had to really fight to keep my composure. "I…I…" I stammered, wretched by emotions suddenly coming up to the surface that I had pushed down for so long. "I wasn't there when it happened!" I told him.
Jason didn't realize what he had opened up by trying to prove what he knew. "I'm...I'm sorry I brought that up," he told me as the music started to pick up temp again. "I guess I didn't realize how bad that might be for you."
"You really have no idea," I chided him, now upset that he had brought all of this past up just when I was forgetting everything. I looked for Patrick, as I needed to retreat and he was my base. Arjuna came running towards me, holding Patrick's jacket.
"Have you seen Patrick?" I shouted over the music.
"I'm looking for him, too," she told me. "His phone's in his jacket and it keeps buzzing and won't stop." I reached inside of the inside jacket pocket where Patrick kept his phone and found it, then pulled up the screen. On the front it read
CODE 01 ALERT: CONTACT ASAP
CODE 01 ALERT: CONTACT ASAP
CODE 01 ALERT: CONTACT ASAP
CODE 01 ALERT: CONTACT ASAP
CODE 01 ALERT…
Oh, shit. Something big had happened. "We've got to find him!" I told Arjuna as Jason stood there with us. Then there was a voice over the speakers, as one of the students spoke into the message microphone.
"All right, all right," the male student called out, "Who brought the helicopter?" Laughter came out of the audience of students in response. We looked towards the stage and saw the student get pushed aside by someone else, someone adult who wore an olive-green
/pilot's uniform, helmet, and leather jacket.
"Excuse me, Excuse me everyone!" the pilot called out and the music in the auditorium suddenly stopped. The din of student conversation dropped down to silence and everyone turned to face the military pilot.
"I'm looking for a Patrick Forrestal. Is there a Patrick Forrestal here?"
Both Jason and Arjuna looked at me with shocked expressions. "He doesn't mean our Patrick does he?" Arjuna asked.
Duty calls. With both of the others in tow I pushed my way through the crowd of students, searching everywhere for Patrick on the dance floor. It didn't take me long to find him, he was on the upper stage, and Linda was right next to him. She looked like
/she had been crying.
Once I spotted him I hurried to the edge of the stage. Patrick spotted me coming his way and rushed over to see me. Angry, I took his jacket from Arjuna's hands and then threw it at him. "You idiot!" I told him. "You didn't check your phone for messages!"
Patrick was resigned over the matter. "Hell of a time to do this," he told me. My brother then looked over at where the pilot was standing, perhaps thirty feet away, but instead of rushing over to him he instead jumped off the stage onto the lower level
/about four feet below. However he didn't land on his feet, and instead tumbled to the floor, grabbing his knee in pain.
I rushed over to where he was and crouched down. His face grimaced in pain as he clutched his knee and held it close to him. "Ow, ow, ow," he groaned.
"What happened?" I asked him as the other students gathered around.
"I think…I think I broke it!" he said with a strained voice.
All I could think of even then was that our Acro team was now history if he was out with a broken knee or leg. "Stupid!" I scolded him. "You shouldn't have jumped down like that!"
Patrick then looked up at me, and this time he had a serious tone in his voice. In the months that I had gotten to know him, I knew when he was joking around and when he really meant it, and this time he really meant it. He said to me, in a soft voice
/"I guess you'll just have to go in my place."
I stood back up, knowing what it meant. "But," I replied, "but I'm not allowed to. I'm not…"
He looked back at me, his eyes focused right at me, and he said in that soft yet serious voice, "Go get 'em tiger," He then winked, and smiled just slightly.
I had always thought piloting EVA was behind me, but now here was a situation where it had again become possible, if not exactly legal. Whether Patrick was faking all of this or not I didn't know, but he was handing me an opportunity I'd never thought
/I'd get again. It was my choice.
Looking for the helicopter pilot, I waived my hand. "Here! He's here!" I shouted. Within a few second the pilot and another solider came down and saw Patrick huddled in agony down on the lower dance floor.
"He's, um, broken something," I told the pilot. He and the other soldier crouched over and tried to move Patrick to see if he was okay, but my brother just howled in pain. The pilot sighed in exasperation.
"Get a medevac to get him out of here," he told the soldier. I then stood in front of the pilot. "You need him, right?" I asked.
"Yes, we do."
"Well," I told him, "I'm Erin Forrestal, and I can do anything he can do." I didn't mention EVA, I didn't think I needed to.
The pilot considered what was happening. "Anything?" he asked me.
"Yes," I replied, nodding confidently.
"Miss, I got orders to bring him back, but if you can do what he can do then maybe you could help." The pilot motioned to the other soldier. "Get him back to base so they can take him to sickbay and fix that leg," he ordered. Then he turned to me and
/instructed "Miss, you come with me."
Just before leaving with the pilot I turned to face the other students. Standing in front was Arjuna, whose dark skin now seemed nearly sheet-white. Her eyes looked at me in disbelief.
"I told you they were really pilots," Jason said to her.
Patrick was still crouched down on the gymnasium floor, now being tended to by both the soldier and by Linda who had decided Patrick needed her special kind of care in his moment of duress. I looked at him one last time and he just smiled at me for a
/moment, then went back to groaning loudly.
Turning back to Arjuna and Jason, I said to both of them "Hey, wish me luck!" Jason offered a thumbs-up, while Arjuna, panicked by what she now realized was the truth, put her hands to her mouth in fear. With no time left to lose I turned around and hurried
/as I followed the pilot out of the gym and towards the playing field where he had parked his helicopter.
The flight to First Branch was short, around twenty minutes, and it was freezing cold in the cabin as I had left my coat and wrap behind. On the way I told myself that I must be crazy for doing this. Even so, I figured that I wasn't going to sit this
/dance out either.
My sentence had stipulated that I couldn't get within fifty miles of any EVA unit, and that tracker chip underneath my skin was how they enforced that. Would they know I was coming? Obviously, and that had to be my first hurdle to jump.
When we finally landed on a helipad high up on one of the larger buildings at First Branch, the cabin door of the helicopter was opened. Facing me were four green-patterned camouflaged soldiers, each with their assault rifles pointed right at me. So much
/for a warm welcome.
The pilot was confused about my reception and nearly immediately got into an argument with an officer that was standing next to the soldiers. Then out of a doorway that faced the landing pad came another figure, a petite young woman wearing a grey suit
/with heels.
"Erin!" Olivia Perry called to me as she rushed towards the helicopter. "What are you doing here?"
"Patrick hurt himself," I explained briefly.
"Figures. The one time we call an alert in the last three months and he doesn't show up." She then faced the soldiers that had me under guard. "Well, what the hell are you doing? Let her get off the damn chopper!"
"She can't come!" the officer argued. "I have a restriction on her, she's not allowed on base!"
"Look," Olivia argued, "didn't you hear what she said? She's the only available pilot. Unless you want to try the dummy plug with the unit she's all we got."
"That's not your call," said the officer.
"Hey, we're fucking NERV here, and we got more important things to do then let some lawyers jack us around." Olivia reached in and pulled me by the arm out of the helicopter. "If you got a problem, go upstairs with it but we can't wait any longer." Not
/quite knowing what else the do, the soldiers let us by while the officer got on his phone. We left them on the landing pad as Olivia walked me into an elevator. We both entered the car and she used a key to bypass the control panel, the elevator doors
/closing and we swiftly moved downward.
"So," Olivia asked me again. "What happened to your charming brother."
"He, uh, he broke his leg," I said nervously. "I think."
I could tell that Olivia wasn't buying it. "Rather convenient timing, that," she replied with a smirk. "Looks like he got you here after all." The elevator stopped and we got out and both of us walked down what looked like one of the engineering passages
/at either one of the NERV bases I had been to before, as Olivia led me down a couple of corridors to get to our first stop.
"What's gong on?" I asked her. "Did another angel show up?"
"Angel? No, not an angel." We arrived at one room and walked inside. It was a storage area of some kind and Olivia looked through several bins to find what she needed. She pulled out one storage crate and opened it. Inside was exactly one large orange-colored
/duffle bag with black stripes and the number "04" emblazoned on it.
"Is that yours?" she asked me.
I pulled the plug suit carrier out of the storage crate and then opened up the zipper, checking the suit to be sure that it my own and not one of Patrick's. I had worn one of his before and that wasn't at all comfortable on me. "Yes, it's mine."
"Then let's get you suited up. We've got a ways to fly to the target and I'll brief you on the way."
For the first time in nine months I suited up and then entered the entry plug of Evangelion Unit 04. It felt good to be back. Just like so many times before, I rested on the control throne while the plug was flooded with LCL and we ran though the initiation
/sequence, with nothing out of the ordinary. It was a little hard breathing in the LCL again however after such a long time out of action and after a scary moment or two I had settled back into routine. My sync rate was lower than usual, this time
/it was 23%, but I figured it had been a while and told myself not to worry about it. Once we were fully active Unit 04 was lifted out of the EVA cages by cranes and then loaded onto a giant cargo aircraft. As they were loading I got a good view of
/First Branch's facilities while we were being moved from the EVA cage to the airfield and they were impressive if not as gigantic inside as Tokyo-3's GeoFront.
Our target was a location in the American southwest, and it would take four hours to fly there. During the flight Olivia, who was seated with a controller crew in the same transport that was carrying us, gave me the full mission briefing via video channel
/on the plug's display monitor.
"Did anyone tell you that there were survivors from SEELE's central committee?" Olivia asked me.
"Nope."
"Yeah, well, one dickhead escaped Norway and somehow got a hold of a spare Mass Production Evangelion."
"That's not good."
"Not at all. They spotted this thing in the Mojave desert a few hours ago. Where he managed to recover it we haven't determined, but now that we know it's there we need to find it and kill it. Alliance recon has tracked the enemy EVA moving towards the
/abandoned city of Las Vegas. You know where that is?"
I did know. It was close to home, or what had once been home. "I've been there, actually,"
"Really? But no one's been allowed there for years."
"My father took me there once when I was younger. There's a bunch of giant old hotels and stuff, looks like a bunch of ancient monuments now."
"There's also a bunch of underground infrastructure below the main hotels," Olivia added. "Not to mention a giant airport right next door. It's large and solid and deep enough that you could make an operations base out of it if you were so inclined. We
/think maybe this has become some sort of secret hideout for these leftover SEELE guys."
"So what do I have to do?"
"It's simple: find that harpy and destroy it. We'll do the rest. There is a backup EVA unit coming from Japan, but you'll arrive on target first as we need to get a jump on this thing before it gets away. So when we get there, land and engage and hopefully
/we won't need the backup. "
I nodded to Olivia. "Got it."
"Then get lots of rest on the ride over there, kiddo. You'll likely need it." She closed the video channel and I settled into the throne for the rest of the flight. I was happy to be piloting EVA again but I was also worried: this time I really was alone,
/no copiloting with Patrick, and no one else but me up against this thing. I wondered if I was really ready at all.
As promised, we've got some more EVA action coming and we're building up to a climax, hopefully about two more chapters to go until this is finished so hang on.